Annalog

The lyric of the film theme says “Who you gonna call ?/Ghostbusters !” 

  And I don’t know who else to call.   In 2016 I began to buy my gas and electricity from EDF, a large company, French holding company, sounded safe enough.  I told them I was elderly, lived alone and had eye problems.  I  was not going to have a smart meter (the promotion for which was voiced as a choice) and didn’t use a mobile telephone (clumsy, hate the sound quality and regard the philosophy with suspicion).  I paid by direct debit.  Don’t tell me what everybody else does.  I account for me. 

And of course the pandemic played hell with work patterns.  Through 2021, men (precise term) accredited to EDF read both meters 18 January, 11 February, 12 March and from then on, for no reason that they could give me, the gas meter only – 9 May, 23 August and in 2022 16 May.   I presumed (never presume) that EDF knew what they were doing.  

Discovering I could put meter readings through on line,  I did, a number of times.  I received the same form through the post repeatedly asking me for all my details which have all remained exactly the same, and I filled them in and returned them, including once a full description  of the  gas meter as I saw it – and this I sent through the post, to an EDF address in Plymouth.  No response.

Eventually (now, I think I was slow,: then, I thought I was not making an unnecessary fuss) I rang customer services. 

Customer services online were revealed to be long on modern courtesies (“Have a nice day!”) and short on information.   End of June, I got a woman with an accent I could identify (radio ears) who told me that I hadn’t had the meter read for a long time.  The six visits reading the meter(s) “didn’t count.” The meter readings on line “didn’t count”.  And she didn’t answer when I asked why the electricity meter hadn’t been read.  I must send a photograph of the gas meter.  I said what about the electricity meter.  The gas meter, she insisted.

I explained about the lack of mobile, she confirmed by name on email what she wanted: I asked Amy Capable to help, the picture was sent.   I waited three weeks and sent all the details through again.   No response.

Suddenly EDF sent me the offer of a new tariff – yes, I know it’s from a computer but even a computer is programmed.   Miracles, wonderful, two years fixed rate at more money, £150 back to help you, in the small print it can be cancelled at any time.  And I saw

red.

So I emailed customer services and asked why I was being offered a new tariff when I was in dispute and waiting to hear from them, wrote all the details out again.  And on Wednesday 27 July 2022 got up to an email which said  “Thank you for your email, I can see this account in contention has already been ended with us, please let us know if we have missed any details … Have a nice day and stay safe.”   

I went on line, I found a telephone number, I got the voice of a young man in Kwa Zulu Natal which is where EDF’s call centre is.  I gave him my account number, he asked for my name and (first time) date of birth.  I explained.  “No” he said “ the account is not closed.”   I asked for his patience and told him the story without histrionics, but insisted he listened to the whole story, including the terms under which EDF took me on. 

He said the meter reading visits counted, though he could not explain not reading the electricity meter.  He could not explain why the readings on line were ignored.  He could not explain no response to the requested photograph of the gas meter.   He wanted to make an appointment to have the meters read.  I said “On two conditions: one, you confirm this arrangement to me on email and two, it is for both meters because the electricity meter has not been read for over a year.” He gave me a complaints number, though as of this writing, I have not heard a word.  Ghostbusters.   

Am I going away ?  No 

Prostrate in the heat ?  Not so far

Taking a break ?   Yes …

Because I can’t do annalog without help and the help is taking a pause and a breath

We’ll all be a couple of weeks older when annalog recommences in August, we should live so long !

Yes, yes, I know  – only bad news

sells – Ukraine, famine, the leadership contest, the young and desperate  spending thousands of pounds to have healthy teeth capped in Turkey and bringing any ensuing dental problems back to the  staggering NHS.  And energy companies, cost of living, police failures, and a new book about Harry and Meghan.   So clearly, annalog isn’t about money because I am not going to write about any of them.

I am going to tell you that a week in which it is noted that small independent bookshops are thriving in the US is a trend to be celebrated and I hope it crosses the Atlantic. 

Fin whales have made a quantifiable return to the Antarctic.

Every time I see a grey squirrel, I wonder if it has had its daily contraceptive which is an irreverent way to respond to serious experiments to dose the Canadian intruder into infertility and give native red squirrels a chance.  Hope it make them so sick

it makes them unable to do the damage they do to trees too.

I was pottering about in a long cool A shaped cotton dress, modest neck and half sleeves, when there was a knock at the door.  Not a week goes by without somebody trying to collect for something.  But before I could speak the very young and appealing Asian exclaimed “ Oh,  that material.  Where’s it from ?”   “Russia, “ I said truthfully.  1930s.”

He asked where I got it, made sure he had the name straight, I declined to contribute to his collection and asked if I could show him something else.  Casting a glance at his companions, who were moving on, he said yes and I raced to show him an Indian fabric so fine, you just handwash it, drip it and wear it.  He asked reverently if he could touch it, we beamed at each other.  “I make dresses” he said.  “Thank you for all this –“he gestured.  I asked his name, we shook hands.  Thank you, Ali.

Discarded fast fashion is spread 30 miles across the Atacama Desert, has impeded a successful Indian industry for recycling but our often misguided government has invested in a goody – a  infrared scanner sorting through  clothes too worn to be sold in charity shops and based in Kettering, it’s a new project from the business wing of The Salvation Army.  

It won’t stop thoughtless people  dumping the unwearable in the street or pushing off the unwanted into charity shops where it can’t be used (Pam the Painter tells me she spends a lot of time sorting out the “can be sold” from the “must be dumped”).  But it is part of WRAP (Waste and Resources Action Programme), John Lewis is looking at co operation and the machine has four time the capacity currently in use.  Three cheers for “it’s never over till it’s over”  the  slogan for linouiio the recycling firm  of Linda and John Parkinson.

Magazines were my first print love, offering colour and introducing you to a magnificent range of  ideas.  Once (and only once) I turned a page in Vogue,  to see the fashion edition of a dress already in my wardrobe.  Usually editorial teaches you something – thanks to Loise Eccles as Consumer Affairs Editor, Sunday Times for the above – makes you think or get in touch, buy the book, ask the questions.  Just occasionally though, you smile knowingly.  Because you got there first.

In one of the trilogy on Elizabeth I , the fine historical writer Margaret Irwin has a doctor upbraid the young princess for the amount of glass in her room, letting in light.  I am not suggesting we go back to holes in the roof but I like the light where it belongs – outside.    

My flat is on the ground floor and I hate curtains.  In a city, they are very expensive dust traps.   I have heavy wooden shutters.  Keeps the warm in during the winter, keep the light and thus heat out in summer.  One time investment. 

Something I got right.  The flat is 100 years old, the windows are sashes.  You close the shutters to the light at the front, open the windows to the air at the back : good news.

It was the first place I ever felt at home in London and I go back to it, like a point on a compass. The greengrocer has a shop in South Kensington and I have been his customer at intervals for years so this time when I arrived – I was the only customer – he put his hands on my shoulders and said “He’s gone.” 

  “Really gone ?”  “Well, he’s gone as leader of the party and he’s to go as PM in three months.”  “Nah” I said.  “He can still do a lot of damage …”  and the young assistant who looks like a renegade from Gogol began to laugh.  “You really don’t like him” he said.   “No.”  I never did. 

50 years ago, I had my most prestigious secretarial job for a wonderful old American businessman, with whom I would probably disagree about all sorts of things, but whom I respected utterly.   He received a communication from the American Embassy asking him to endorse for re election to office an American politico.  “Put that in an envelope” he said to me, handing me his signed mail, and he had written across the bottom in his wholly legible hand above his signature ” I wouldn’t vote him for dog catcher.”

Although I can write about anything I like in annalog, I try not to  “go on.”  There’s always rubbish in the street  (I began my Sunday picking up somebody  else’s menstrual discards with which the foxes had had a field day from a bag dumped at the top of the road).   I could write every week about the cost of everything – I am in dialogue with edf about the so called non reading of the meter, the latest person I dealt with telling me that the men

who came accredited to my door six times in 2021, once so far this year, don’t mean anything – so who sent them ?   And why do they only read the gas meter ?  No answer. No the automated reading doesn’t count –  why ? (silence) … looks like a long haul.  And Wal who is fiercely practical and good with money has just received a demand for £700 for a month’s electricity.  Six chemists later, I am told that there is no calamine, variously, that there is a run on it (what, head to foot ?)

or that suppliers can’t get it – why ?  Item by item, shopping costs more and I sat next to a woman older than I who lives in an area of Kensington and Fulham without tube services, who is looking at the axing of the bus route upon which she depends.

Nobody is minding the store.   We are all horribly exposed.  And it is terrifying.

But when I admired the jacket of a younger woman in the street,  she turns out to be librarian for a community library so I have been sorting through the shelves to donate treasured books where they will be appreciated.  And thus found one of those books I never read  (because I was afraid I wouldn’t understand it, however much I appreciate the films of Jean-Pierre Melville )

but I am reading it now.  With joy.

I shared a bus unimaginably slowed by a bad junction, traffic lights and gridlock with a Somali born teacher who was trying to get to school early to get everything ready for open day and when the bus finally began to move, we were the only two people left on it – we cheered and clapped and the driver tooted and we made it.  Just.

I feel badly about my noisy old washing machine on a Sunday morning  but the washing was out and on the line first thing, one of summers greatest bonuses. 

Whatever his many sins and shortcomings, US President Biden’s message acknowledging our current upheaval was one of his most professional and elegant.  Damn right, talk about us, all of us, the people  – and devil take a leadership competition chiefly characterised by “Anybody Can Do Anything” –  because they can’t.  We just had three years of that dance and all we have to show for it is bleeding toenails.

An untidy lot, we had a history at home of putting something important in a safe place 

– which meant you’d have difficulty in finding it.    Nowadays the “safe place” in my mind just blanks and I sit up at 3.00 am muttering “ Stephen Boyd” as opposed to Steve Cochran and another Steve that’s still in there somewhere. 

Having a name for dementia hasn’t made it any better.  And we all have those moments when you blank, a piece of information slips.  You did when you were 12 and it wasn’t incipient dementia.   You just forgot.  Left alone, most of the time, the thing swims back to the surface of the mind

and that’s probably normal.

I haven’t spent much time thinking about normal.  Fitting in was made manageable by recognised courtesies and shrewd watchfulness, encouraged by magnificently intelligent and open minded parents who were interested in a lot of things, singularly unthreatened by other people’s experiences and differences in life . 

In a recent contribution to the Radio Academy (a fine experience, not putting it down for one moment) I was electrified to be asked “Didn’t you think it was unusual for a woman to be discussing what you were talking about on air then ?”   No, I said, it never occurred to me.   Daughter and grand daughter of teachers (my mother’s father was a journalist) – if you could find a way, there was nothing you couldn’t talk about.  And I didn’t add then, but I will now – and a good job too. 

The unasked question, the observation pushed aside,  often makes for trouble in life or the hole in an otherwise interesting script (see The Weapon made in 1956, on TPTV last night with George Cole as an opportunistic killer, so slimy that you’d expect somebody to pick up on how dubious he was).  In a word – not normal.

I came to dread normal as in being asked “But is it normal ?” 

  To which I would answer “I don’t know – is it normal (ie acceptable) for you ?”  Unburdened by preoccupations about notions of pleasure, if you are not hurting anybody (physically or emotionally) and you’re having a fine time, so be it.   I am not going to know what goes on in other people’s lives till they tell me about it which often denotes misgiving.  In years and years of listening to other people’s stories, I very rarely heard worry about what anybody else might think.  The person on the phone or in the letter is telling you the recipient that he or she is worried about its normality or lack of it.

There is a new book called Am I Normal ? (by Sarah Chaney) which charts the word moving away from the specific to something with a much wider implication and therefore influence, through the classification of intelligence in children and the pernicious burden of perceived body types .  For years I was told that I was not normal  – I was “excitable” or “melodramatic”. 

It hurt.  But it’s me.   Every time I met somebody from some more exotic location or somebody who was as interested as I was in books, bullterriers or blues – and they found me “normal” – I was reassured.  It is only in later life that I understood the range of normality – it isn’t one thing, it is a whole range of acceptable variants.   Or as they say in the north, nowt so queer as folk.  I can’t remember the first person who described me as passionate, it wasn’t a lover.  But modern parlance extends to energy.  And I love it.|I don’t know whether it is normal or not and I couldn’t care less.  If I have to be stoned for something, let it be for this. 

As in: a man under 40 got on the bus the other day, and he had magnificently defined dark blue green eyes, eyelashes to die for.  A few minutes passed and I asked  “ Excuse me, may I ask a rude question ?  Where are you from ?”   As he turned to smile at me, he said unmistakeably “Wales – but the other side is Italian.”  “Wow” I said.  “Celt and Latin – that’s a mixture –“   And we talked happily for a few minutes till he left saying in farewell ” Keep the energy – it’s wonderful.”      

BBC2 ran a series called

Art That Made Us.  And in between working artists, images known and unknown, information and commentary, of course there were things that didn’t work for me -but they were minor compared to eight segments of something I wanted to watch.  So I wrote to the man in overall charge.   Not a word.  

Of course the email may never have reached him, remaindered or rejected by a busy assistant.  Perhaps he can’t stand me so that, even if he recognises my name, it’s not helpful.  Acknowledgement would be nice.  Nada.

There are more ways of getting in touch now, in touch is social hives.  Everybody’s got it and it itches.  People carry their mobiles bedroom, bathroom, car crash and supermarket but there is no voicemail so you can’t leave a message.  If you’re the caller, you go right on calling.   You know the names of the speedy answering/share/ social media platforms better than me.  I avoid them like the plague.   I have friends who make good use of them – personal choice. 

I have done well with the Post Office

but occasionally you send something first class (small mortgage) and it arrives a week later.  I like emails, they convinced a lot of people they could communicate through writing – but my neighbour upstairs having given her details to me, confessed “I don’t very often look at it.”    Right – note through the door then.   Only picks that up when the mood is on her.  Note on the door does better.

Sitting with two intelligent 25 year olds in their first jobs having embarked on careers in architecture (quite different approaches), they agreed that the most important thing was what we used to call interpersonal communication.  Talk and get people to talk. Everything is more possible from there.

I was brought up to speak to people.  And I have broad shoulders – brush off, fish eye, bloody rude – your business.  I go on doing it because it works.

  And people doing all those jobs we take for granted mostly open like roses in a little verbal sunshine.  Nowadays I think it is a profoundly political act, to speak across age, education, class, expectation and colour, human to human.   And I have wonderful adventures and meet interesting people again and again.  Not illegal, immoral or fattening.  Life – and I remain largely enthusiastic about it because of this approach.

40 years ago I met a successful presenter, fronting a chatty series to which she asked me to contribute.  I agreed and she was warm and competent, I liked her.   All these years later, a friend drew to my attention a written interview, where she remarked generously on my breakthrough programmes. I found an address and wrote a personal and private letter of thanks.   She took the trouble to reply, to say she meant what she said.  Keep the diamonds.  I’ll keep that card.

If you saw something in the paper which spoke especially to you, you used to write to the journalist in care of his employer.  Not now.  Nowadays there is an index of where to write re current affairs, arts, politics etc.  And I can just imagine some young thing designated to go through them and not to bother anybody important with them, a breakdown in communication exemplified.

  The economist writing about related matters for the Sunday Times has an email and replies.  Thank you David Smith.  But you have no way of communicating your feedback which leads at worst to a stand off –  like over 60 per cent of the American public support abortion  – and their Supreme Court rules against it.  Don’t tell us what you want to hear.  We’ll tell you what to listen to.

The other day I bought raspberries from the Co -op.  They were big fruit, of which I am wary but they were delicious.  I looked up the supplier and sent a note quoting the variety and saying “Just bought them, outstanding, thank you.  Some of us really want to support our farmers. “  And I got a reply.    Hence the title for this annalog – *communicate, respond , acknowledge.

National Rail strike

will not protect members in the railway ticket offices whom it is planned to phase out.   Big saving ?  Bigger mistake.  Trains may be mechanical but they are driven, maintained and deployed by people for people.  Reduce the human face of the railway and forget it.  False economy.   On-line is unlikely to be the future.  It is beginning to falter.  And if the whole shooting match is committed – including banking, social systems, medicine, travel, Old Uncle Tom Cobley and all – the  country is completely exposed and when one part of the system falters, the rest is at risk and it’s only a matter of overload and mistiming before shutdown.  

NB always have a sum of old fashioned money behind a brick and don’t tell anybody about it.  A secret is not a secret if it is shared. Especially if it is about money.

I re read Spartacus

the other day, the Howard Fast novel Kirk Douglas purchased  which became one of those few exceptions – a better film than a book.   All sorts of decent people would be horrified to think of this as a slave culture but in Britain it is more and more those who have and those who prop up the haves, who are not haves themselves, and it is chilling.  The middle ground for anything is being eroded before our eyes.

We might cope with some of this, if it were explained.  We might not like the explanation but at least we wouldn’t feel so out manoeuvred.  When I rang my GP surgery to ask about the Covid booster I was dismissed with “Nothing to do with us.”  Gee, thanks.   I was polite, really I was.  And a friend recently campaigned for 6/8 weeks to be seen by his doctor for a chest infection

lingering entirely too long and separately, a family history of melanoma (his nose).  His GP practise sent him a form.  He wrote and said he had to be seen.  He was directed – this all took ages – to an Acute IIlness Surgery.  Finally he got to a helpful doctor, obviously the facility is partly NHS, partly privately funded.  Bad chest infection prescribed for, getting the drugs is a whole other story, different place for the melanoma (appointment as yet unconfirmed).  

My friend is an intelligent man.  If you explained to him that, staggering under input and expectation,  the NHS can’t field enough doctors to deal with routine infections, he wouldn’t like it – he paid into it all his long working life, why can’t he have the bit he needs now ? –  but he’d grasp the point.   However in his professional life, he organised systems and deployed resources.  They could do with him now, even on a consultancy basis for an honorarium. 

There are increasing numbers of children in care

and no help for adoptive families.  This is not a new story – it is repetitive.  The figures for children in care only go up and it is hard work to take over a child  already reneged on, brutalised, disappointed.  Adoption and fostering deserves support but about every five years, this story comes round again -with the occasional bit of good news as when the local authorities pull the stops out or somebody brilliant intervenes.   It is not usual.   So – here we go again – it is a good thing to do, now let’s make it as difficult for you as possible.      

The government is going to build umpteen new homes ?  It doesn’t need to.  Surely better to bring in an ordinance which rules that no building may stand empty

for longer than a year.  After that, it is compulsorily sold through the local authority with the aim of primarily providing homes.  And yes, bite the bullet :  you will need to repair and maintain those dwellings – and that unskilled, desperate for shelter , second group ( vetted for police records, light fingers, county lines and every other kind of abuse) will get a concession and do the job.  Just as they always did.

At the time of my long ago menopause, HRT was as prevalent as GSTQ (God Save The Queen) but now it has become the rallying call of women denied  -though a thoughtful journalist countered with a piece about the medicalisation of women’s health. 

Mixed messages, anyone ?   

One of the best things about the pandemic

was that, shut up with stuffed drawers and desks and  wardrobes we spent our time ignoring, we no longer could.  I know several people who have discovered the joys of going through the carefully saved whatever it was, only to discover that it could go …  I have a friend clearing the house for major renovation and she’s effectively permitted to do what she has always felt she should not. 

I am quite ruthless about clothes. 

If they are not being worn, I don’t keep them.  I’d rather give them to a friend or a charity shop than save something in case I use it again.  Yes, I have twice made a decision I regret but twice in a lifetime isn’t much.    And I know all sorts of people who keep clothes, out of fashion, wrong size, frankly unbecoming, but nicely made or good material or “it would do a turn” … only it never does.

Shut up with the evidence of fashion folly, the only thing they spent money on was black bags. And thoroughly enjoyed the experience.  I was one of the people who went through storage shelves (Oxfam benefited) and Wal gets the gold star because he committed to major overhaul.   After clearing out his extensive wardrobe, he embarked on the office clearout and like most domestic tasks, it has the joy of beginning, middle and end and you can see the results.

The only thing I try to avoid throwing away is food.

   No, that doesn’t mean you’d open my fridge and see six string beans on a saucer.  It means that by and large I shop very carefully having learned painfully that just because I bought family sized portions, it didn’t follow that I had anyone to serve them to. 

Last week however, I picked up by mistake a fish I don’t like in the chilled section, got it home, put it carefully in the fridge with the receipt and took it back the following morning.  Where it was refused  by a man who was both straightforward and likeable.  “Can’t help you, I’m afraid,” he said and when I asked why, he explained I had it from the chill counter  – so it had been chilled and unchilled and rechilled several times which is not conducive to food being good or safe to eat.   So sadly I took it home again, and ditched it.  

When I throw food away, I hear the voices of both parents.   You only discarded food in absolute extremis, and you must do all in your power to avoid that.  Even now, very much an adult, I feel badly throwing away food, It Will Be Noticed

and I will get a black mark.  I don’t think even custard pies met with much approval from my family  (“You don’t throw food around” was a childhood mantra.)

So I was struck when, within the first few weeks of the Ukraine hostilities, I’d seen a commodities broker on tv, talking about the destruction of various food stuffs by the Russians and how this would impact on different countries.  Since then the United Nations has made its repulsion clear.   Not only is the food destroyed but the ground it grows in is soiled and damaged and will take years to repair.

And farmers in Britain can’t get the hands to harvest the crops they have grown, backbreaking labour usually carried out from the people from the Eastern Slavonic and Baltic countries, and finding others to do the job is proving difficult.  So people who have grown crops are having to plough vegetables back into the soil,

a write off in food and money.  This may be modest in scale now, but it can only get worse and it represents lost income to the country.    

You can’t help thinking that at least some of the illegal migrants who don’t want to go to Rwanda could do this job for one season on a proper contract.  And I wrote to the National Farmers Union and suggested that able bodied pensioners could be seconded in, yes, it would take a bit of managing but at least they were on site – and got one those “don’t worry, it’s all under control” letters.  Only it isn’t.  In the ante room to war, we need to think strategically

– we need HTTP (hands to the pump).  Surely some of those able bodied moneyed early retired and OAPs could do something more constructive than tan and play tennis.  

Three years ago or more, I bought something in Boots from a young woman who asked “Are you an actress ?”   “No” I said.  “I was a broadcaster.”  And she remarked on my voice,

said her sister made films and they were always looking out for good voices – could she have a contact number ?  I gave her my email (when in doubt, just press delete) and really didn’t think very much more about it. 

When she got in touch, I was introduced to her sister and plans were made for a little film which didn’t happen because of time, other demands and latterly the pandemic. It was ever thus. 

A soft female voice on the telephone tried to introduce herself and I had a bad case of the Bracknells.  Who was she ?  It was the once met sister and when we got that straight and I apologised, she asked me if I would like to contribute to a radio commercial for Breast Cancer Now

– part of a whole range of voices reading the same lines which they would then edit.  “Sure” I said “when do you want to do this ?”   Tomorrow afternoon.  “OK”.   The car arrived early as I had asked for it, outward and return journeys booked in writing.  Lifts the heart.

No this is not a comeback.  No I won’t get rich from this –  but I had the joy working at voice over again after many years, and I always loved it, the verbal equivalent of music, placing tone and notes in accordance with instructions.

   I came back in the quiet clean car in a passion of gratitude.

That night a young man knocked at my door.  Italian he said, out of work, on the street, found a hostel but it was £14 a night.  I have been reading about animals and he smelt right.  I gave him £20  and , with perfect grace, he turned on the doorstep and kissed me in accordance with his culture on both cheeks.

Thursday I woke at 5.30 or so , I don’t like 5.00 anything.

  Nearly too late to sleep, too early for anything else –  so I got up, drank a glass of water and put the coffee on.  Drinking coffee first thing happens less than half a dozen times a year, and of course if I abreacted in any way, it would put me right off.  Stolen pleasure.  Paddled about, put things away, took the cup and read the opening of The Daughter of Time for the 794^th time and sipped.  As it used to say on the sugar packages in my favourite NYC coffee shop “black as night, sweet as love and hot as the devil.”

In due course I assembled clothes and spectacles to go down the road and get the paper, joyfully ambling through the cool morning.  I was in the kitchen when there was suddenly a lot of noise.  

A great big lorry loaded with planks (don’t ask me, I don’t know)

was trying to come from the left while the council clearing up vehicle was trying to advance from the right.   The noise was considerable.  A long limbed young man in a safety gilet was shouting something, there were others shouts –  well, you don’t want a man to feel he is the only shouter – and I began to laugh.  The sign on the back of the lorry said “Men Loading”.  Should have said Men Shouting. And it continued. I went and got the broom and swept the front steps clear of dead blossom.  Along with every other person under 40 or so, my neighbours clean inside but not out. 

The lorry moved to the kerb and the dung beetle van passed on.   I ate breakfast and drank the second cup of coffee, put on my rubber gloves, collected a black bag and went up the road.  The next turning on the left is planned to be closed to traffic for a street party.  Outside the two flat building on the corner is stinking rubbish.  It has been there six weeks, awash with cold rain and smelling ever more noxious.  I cleared it, never mind the bunting.  Have a nice day.   

The Chelsea Flower Show

is held at the bottom of the street the bus travels to take me to where I mostly like to shop, though what has become of Kings Road in the last few years is a sort of lesson in pre pandemic slump and post pandemic stall.  Lots of gone gone gone and very little happening that makes you straighten your spine and smile.

A friend who doesn’t like crowds reminded me of the dates of the CFS.  Ever hopeful, I went up there on one afternoon, thinking I am not in any hurry, I’m sure it will be fine … and walked into an ants’ nest, people scattered all over the immediate and surrounding area like Smarties with feet. 

I tried not to feel proprietorial – my shops, my streets – but I didn’t feel comfortable.  So I bought satsumas and took the bus home.   It took forever but we got there and while we drove I began to wonder.  I was almost afraid.  Well then, what was I afraid of ?   Numbers, noise, invasion of personal territory … yes  … but when did this begin to happen ?

When the Chancellor came up this week with a package apparently aimed at people worst hit by the cost of living rises and widely estimated to be worth £15 billion pounds, I heard my mother’s voice in my ear – “I can’t imagine a billion anything” she said.   “Not a billion eggs or a billion cabbages – still less a billion pounds.” 

 Thank heaven she can’t see the current madness.    

And I started to wonder – what was my earliest experience of the crowd ?   As a Special Constable, Pop helped park cars at Ayresome Park during football matches, but my first crowds were small affairs like Bonfire Night or a jumble sale and Bertram Mills’ Circus.  

I went to markets and flower shows though as neither of my parents liked crowds, they didn’t much come my way.  

I first saw crowds in London to which I came when I was 17 but London was so big, that if there were crowds in one place, you could avoid them in another.  There was always a quiet place.  And the crowds had reasons, shopping, street markets for food, plants and animals,  antiques and curiosities,

or the queues to see Breakfast at Tiffanys when it was new.

John Kennedy was shot when I was living in New York and I remember people all over the street, and that continued throughout the days of mourning that followed, as if people desperately wanted to see other people in a kind of social looking glass  – sort of if she’s there, and she’s all right, then so am I. 

Film of masses in Russia or China or Nazi Germany seemed overwhelming,  of an almost dreamlike quality.   I knew that the Third Reich had fallen but China and Russia were far away, enormous and far away.   It is one of the historical sleights of hand of emergence of nation that until very recently, I had no idea – and I bet other people don’t either – of the size of the Americas – any of them.  Perhaps you have to want to see it.  And if those enormous countries had enormous populations, they also had vast open spaces where there was nothing at all.

Nowadays the millions and billions of other people communicate through the social media

whose positives and negatives are at best about equal.   What is truly unsettling is how human beings use it, repetitively, addictively.   They enjoy the sense of all the other people – a kind of “I’m with them.”  And even a human crowd can be benign or threatening.  I suppose you only read it retrospectively if it doesn’t harm you.  And you can hide in it.

I was told that the biggest crowd I ever spoke to was a quarter of a million on a Right To Work march in the 1980s.   But it may have been far smaller.   I know that if you work with a crowd, even it’s a couple of hundred people at some charitable or social function, you only have sense of them collectively.  They make up the audience which is an animal you as the speaker have to manage.  So I feel lost in the crowd as I might entirely alone.